More than 100 meetings. That is how many investors Abhishek Gupta says the Circles.Life founders sat across from before their first major round came together. One investor, he has said, showed interest within half an hour. The other hundred or so did not.
The founders, Rameez Ansar, Gupta and Adeel Najam, had met while working in places like McKinsey, BCG, Temasek, Huawei and Bain Capital. They were frustrated by what they called static and restrictive telco plans, and they wanted to give power back to the customer.
With the money Circles took the model abroad: Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, Japan.
The problem was that nobody had heard of them. A digital-only telco was a new idea in Singapore, and a new brand with no stores had to persuade people to hand over their phone numbers. They lacked trust, awareness and resources. Hiring was hard too, because a startup nobody knew was asking for good people to leave safe jobs.
They started small, working from the BLK 71 startup hub. A wholesale deal with the telco M1 in July 2015 gave them the network they could not afford to build. The public launch came in 2016. Then they got loud. One stunt was a vending machine that gave S$50 for S$3. Another was a vandalism-style campaign, Youtiao666, that got people talking. The company says it signed over 100,000 customers in its first year.
The turn came when investors did start to listen. Sequoia backed the company in 2019, EDBI and Founders Fund followed in June of that year and Warburg Pincus in 2020. With the money Circles took the model abroad: Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, Japan. By June 2022 it said it held more than 7 percent of Singapore's mobile market. A SPAC deal with Bridgetown was reported that July at around US$2.5 billion.
The price of speed was a map full of exits. Indonesia's Live.On customers moved to XL Axiata's AXIS brand in February 2024. Taiwan was scheduled to close in July 2024. The Australian business shut in January 2025 and its customers went to Amaysim. The listing talks did not end in a listing.
The lasting business may be the software. Circles turned its own telco platform into a product other operators could buy.
A founder reading this should notice the numbers in the opening: one yes in half an hour, a hundred slow noes. The story of the company is mostly what happened after the person in the middle of that spread finally said yes.